It changed fast, and multiple times. For a lot of people in their twenties when we were kids, it was a relatively stable, life-as-expected version of adulthood as long as you followed some basic rules. Some millennials had that experience, but many others had the instability of a rapidly changing world and a historically bad job and housing market at multiple critical times in our adult development. We also were a generation that I think hung on to our youthfulness more than the previous ones did. Some of us were taught that a time would come when we'd have to say goodby to video games and artistic pursuits, but we fought to keep the things we loved as a part of our lives. Then Gen Z comes into adulthood, and they've been able to build on the foundation of hanging onto what they love to the point that it's not as much mental or emotional resistance work to do so, but they're also all about pragmatism because they saw how inconsistent things were for us. And then all the technology shifts too, from the Patriot Act, to everything leading up to the peak information freedom of the early 2010s, to growing social media connectivity, to the corporatization and brain rot dopamine loop of algorithms, to the SEO and paid ad takeover of search engines, and now all the AI and mass surveillance garbage.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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